The Second World War Read Online Free Page A

and bound them to service for two or three years. There were variations in the proportion of annual
classes
enlisted and fluctuations in the length of service. There were alleviations of obligation for the better educated; typically, for example, high-school graduates served only one year and were then transferred to the reserve as potential officers. Yet the principle of universal obligation that generally held good was also accepted as persisting. Reservists during their early years of discharge returned annually to the colours for retraining; as they grew older they moved to a wartime reserve (
Landwehr
in Germany, Territorial Army in France); and their final years of able manhood were spent on the list of the Home Guard. Reserve training was borne with good humour, even regarded as a sort of all-male holiday. Freud, a reserve medical officer in the Austrian army, writing to a friend from manoeuvres in 1886, observed that ‘it would be ungrateful not to admit that military life with its inescapable “must” is good for neurasthenia. It all disappeared in the first week.’
    Conscription was also relatively egalitarian in its outreach. Jews, like Freud, were as liable as Gentiles and in the Habsburg army automatically became officers if educationally qualified; in the German army, Jews could become reserve officers but were barred by regimental anti-Semitism from holding regular commissions, though Bismarck’s financier, Bleichroder, managed to get his son a regular commission in the household cavalry. The officer who recommended Hitler for his Iron Cross 1st Class was a Jewish reserve officer. This was ‘emancipation’ in its military aspect, and it applied not only to Jews. The universality of conscription swept up every nationality in the Habsburg lands, Poles and Alsace-Lorrainers in Germany, Basques, Bretons and Savoyards in France. All, by being soldiers, were also to be Austrians, Germans or Frenchmen.
    Conscription was an instrument not only of equality but also of
fraternity
. Because it applied to all at the same moment of their lives and in principle treated all in the same way, it forged bonds of brotherhood young Europeans had never before felt. Universal compulsory education, a simultaneous innovation, was currently taking children outside their families and plunging them into a common experience of learning. Conscription took young adults from their locality and plunged them into the experience of growing up – confronting them with the challenge of separation from home, making new friends, dealing with enemies, adjusting to authority, wearing strange clothes, eating unfamiliar food, fn3 shifting for themselves. It was a genuine
rite de passage
, intellectual, emotional and, not least of all, physical. Nineteenth-century armies, told that they were ‘schools of the nation’, took on many of the characteristics of contemporary schools, not only testing and heightening literacy and numeracy but also teaching swimming, athletics and cross-country sports as well as shooting and the martial arts. Turnvater Jahn, the pioneer of physical education in Germany, was a potent influence on Prussian military training; his ideas were propagated in France through the specialist athletics instructors of the Bataillon de Joinville, while in Italy Captain Caprilli founded a school of military horsemanship which was to transform the art of riding throughout the Western world. The healthy outdoorsmanship of military life, lived round the campfire and under canvas, would eventually develop into the ideals of the German youth movement and the code of the Boy Scouts and so make its way back into social and military life by a convergent route.
    The
rite de passage
of universal conscription was not a liberating experience for all. As Professor William McNeill has pointed out, individuals drafted into the army from a society which was rapidly urbanising and industrialising, marching them away from the plough and the village